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Jacobins from Robespierre to Clemenceau, or representatives of Central European reactionary governments from Metternich to Bismarck, had one thing in common: they were all sincerely concerned with the “balance of power” in Europe.
When the catastrophe came, the fate of the Jewish people was considered a “special case” whose history follows exceptional laws, and whose destiny was therefore of no general relevance.
the collapse of German Jewry was preceded by its split into innumerable factions, each of which believed and hoped that its basic human rights would be protected by special privileges—the
Friedrich Nietzsche, who out of disgust with Bismarck’s German Reich coined the word “good European,” which made possible his correct estimate of the significant role of the Jews in European history, and saved him from falling into the pitfalls of cheap philosemitism or patronizing “progressive” attitudes.
its source first in the Roman Empire, where they had been protected, so to speak, by the Roman soldier, and later, in the Middle Ages, when they sought and received protection against the population and the local rulers from remote monarchical and Church authorities.
The history of the relationship between Jews and governments is rich in examples of how quickly Jewish bankers switched their allegiance from one government to the next even after revolutionary changes.
This misjudgment is as amusing in its nai’ve assumption that everyone is like oneself, as Metternich’s sincere belief that “the house of Rothschild played a greater role in France than any foreign government,”
came to light when they were no longer content to serve one particular prince or government through their international relationships with court Jews of other countries, but decided to establish themselves internationally and serve simultaneously and concurrently the governments in Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Austria.
The Rothschilds had entered upon their spectacular career as the financial servants of the Kurfürst of Hessen, one of the outstanding moneylenders of his time, who taught them business practice and provided them with many of their customers. Their great advantage was that they lived in Frankfurt, the only great urban center from which Jews had never been expelled and where they formed nearly 10 per cent of the city’s population at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
group of people would turn antisemitic in a given country at a given historical moment depended exclusively upon general circumstances which made them ready for a violent antagonism to their government.
the Jews were invariably identified with power, and because of their aloofness from society and concentration upon the closed circle of the family, they were invariably suspected of working for the destruction of all social structures.
Modern antisemitism, as we know it from Central and Western European countries, had political rather than economic causes,
There, due to the inability of the governments to solve the land question and give the nation-state a minimum of equality through liberation of the peasants,
Antisemitism first flared up in Prussia immediately after the defeat by Napoleon in 1807, when the “Reformers” changed the political structure so that the nobility lost its privileges and the middle classes won their freedom to develop.
their advocacy of Jewish emancipation, was the consequence of the new equality of all citizens, the abolition of privilege, and the introduction of free trade.
Among the naturally bitter reactions of the aristocracy, the class that was hardest hit, was a sudden and unexpected outburst of antisemitism.
A nobleman’s natural resentment against losing a valuable source of help in emergencies made him want to marry a Jewish girl with a rich father rather than hate the Jewish people.
Anti-Jewish liberal writers did not fail to point out this curious similarity of principles, and they concluded that perhaps one could get rid of nobility only by first getting rid of the Jews, and this not because of their financial connections but because both were considered to be a hindrance to the true development of that “innate personality,” that ideology of self-respect, which the liberal middle classes employed in their fight against the concepts of birth, family, and heritage.
pro-Jewish factors make it all the more significant that the aristocrats started the long line of antisemitic political argumentation.
with the help of the romantic intellectuals, conservatism reached its full development as one of the political ideologies which in Germany adopted a very characteristic and ingeniously equivocal attitude toward the Jews. From then on the nation-state, equipped with conservative arguments, drew a distinct line between Jews who were needed and wanted and those who were not. Under the pretext of the essential Christian character of the state—what could have been more alien to the enlightened despots!—the
in the eighties, Bismarck went to considerable trouble to protect the Jews against Stoecker’s antisemitic propaganda, he said expressis verbis that he wanted to protest only against the attacks upon “moneyed Jewry . . . whose interests are tied to the conservation of our state institutions”
government officials on the one hand protested against equality (especially professional equality) for the Jews, or complained somewhat later about Jewish influence in the press and yet, on the other, sincerely “wished them well in every respect,”31 was much more suited to the interests of the state than the earlier zeal of the reformer.
in the twentieth century, when emancipation was for the first time an accomplished fact for the Jewish masses, the power of the privileged Jews had disappeared.
Concerned mainly with equal opportunity and resenting most of all the revival of aristocratic privileges which limited their admission to the public services, they introduced into the discussion the distinction between individual Jews, “our brethren,” and Jewry as a group, a distinction which from then on was to become the trademark of leftist antisemitism.
new nationalist phrases “state within the state,” and “nation within the nation.” Certainly wrong in the first instance, because the Jews had no political ambitions of their own and were merely the only social group that was unconditionally loyal to the state, they were half right in the second, because the Jews, taken as a social and not as a political body, actually did form a separate group within the nation.
certain theoretical and even literary tradition whose influence can be recognized in the famous anti-Jewish writings of the young Marx, who so frequently and unjustly has been accused of antisemitism. That the Jew, Karl Marx, could write the same way these anti-Jewish radicals did is only proof of how little this kind of anti-Jewish argument had in common with full-fledged antisemitism.
In Germany, it began rather unexpectedly once more among the nobility, whose opposition to the state was again aroused by the transformation of the Prussian monarchy into a full-fledged nation-state after 1871.
Their spokesman, Court Chaplain Stoecker, himself a son of lower middle-class parents, was a much less gifted representative of conservative interests than his predecessors, the romantic intellectuals who had formulated the main tenets of a conservative ideology some fifty years earlier.
This group consisted mainly of the lower middle classes, which now suddenly turned antisemitic. They had been more seriously hurt than any of the other groups: they had risked small savings and had been permanently ruined.
Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
the aristocracy, in a desperate last struggle, tried to ally itself with the conservative forces of the churches—the Catholic Church in Austria and France, the Protestant Church in Germany—under the pretext of fighting liberalism with the weapons of Christianity.
Small as these first antisemitic parties were, they at once distinguished themselves from all other parties. They made the original claim that they were not a party among parties but a party “above all parties.”
The numerous programs of the antisemitic groups, on the other hand, were, from the beginning, chiefly concerned with foreign affairs; their revolutionary impulse was directed against the government rather than a social class, and they actually aimed to destroy the political pattern of the nation-state by means of a party organization.
by attacking the Jews, who were believed to be the secret power behind governments, they could openly attack the state itself, whereas the imperialist groups, with their mild and secondary antipathy against Jews, never found the connection with the important social struggles of the times.
The second highly significant characteristic of the new antisemitic parties was that they started at once a supranational organization of all antisemitic groups in Europe,
The Jews very clearly were the only inter-European element in a nationalized Europe. It seemed only logical that their enemies had to organize on the same principle,
The socialists kept implicitly intact the original concept of a “nation among nations,” all of which belong to the family of mankind, but they never found a device by which to transform this idea into a working concept in the world of sovereign states.
parties of the left did not object to nation-states on principle, but only to the aspect of national sovereignty; since, moreover, their own inarticulate hopes for federalist structures with eventual integration of all nations on equal terms somehow presupposed national liberty and independence of all oppressed peoples,
The supranationalism of the antisemites approached the question of international organization from exactly the opposite point of view. Their aim was a dominating superstructure which would destroy all home-grown national structures alike.
socialists were so concerned with class struggle and so neglectful of the political consequences of their own inherited concepts that they became aware of the existence of the Jews as a political factor only when they were already confronted with full-blown antisemitism as a serious competitor on the domestic scene. Then they were not only unprepared to integrate the Jewish issue into their theories,
As a political movement, nineteenth-century antisemitism can be studied best in France, where for almost a decade it dominated the political scene. As an ideological force, competing with other more respectable ideologies for the acceptance of public opinion, it reached its most articulate form in Austria.
The state machinery itself tried its best to keep the same absolute distance from society, to rule above all nationalities, as the nation-state with respect to its classes. The result for the Jews was simply that the Jewish nationality could not merge with the others and could not become a nationality itself, just as it had not merged with other classes in the nation-state, or become a class itself.
the German nationality, which accelerated after the foundation of the Reich and discovered the usefulness of antisemitic slogans after the financial crash of 1873.
German Liberal Party, under the leadership of Schoenerer, was from the beginning a lower middle-class party without connections or restraints from the side of the nobility, and with a decidedly left-wing outlook.
Schoenerer’s anti-semitism, at first almost exclusively directed against the Rothschilds,
Lueger had won the Mayoralty of Vienna by an antisemitic campaign, the Christian-Socials already adopted that typically equivocal attitude toward the Jews in the nation-state—hostility to the intelligentsia and friendliness toward the Jewish business class.
Since the Hapsburgs were a German house and had granted their German subjects a certain predominance, the Christian-Socials never attacked the monarchy.
Their function was rather to win large parts of the German nationality for the support of an essentially unpopular government.
although they were as much under the influence of clerical circles as was the antisemitic movement in France, they were of necessity much more restrained in their attacks on the Jews because they did not attack the monarchy as the antisemites in France attacked the Third Republic.
the backbone of Schoenerer’s movement was in those German-speaking provinces without any Jewish population at all, where competition with Jews or hatred of Jewish bankers never existed. The survival of the Pan-Germanist movement and its violent antisemitism in these provinces,
